Contractualization issue far from simple in the Philippines

“Contractualization” was one of the hot issues in the May 2016 Philippine elections. In one of the presidential debates, all the then candidates for president, including now President Rodrigo Duterte, vowed to end contractualization. One of the candidates, in fact, had a political advertisement promising to “end the endo”.

Expectedly, many, especially from the labour sector, were jubilant. After all, the simplistic understanding was that there would be no more contractual employees, so all would be regular employees. It must be noted that the Labour Code in the Philippines does not contain any definition of the term “contractualization”; in fact, the term is not in the Labour Code. The term contractual is in Department Order No. 18-A of the rules on outsourcing, referring to employees of contractors or agencies. Loosely, however, the government refers to contractual employees as simply those who are not regular employees.

CAMPAIGN PROMISE

Six months into the Duterte administration and we have yet to see the fruition of this campaign promise. The Secretary of the Department of Labour and Employment (DOLE), Sylvestre Bello, had announced that the DOLE would issue Department Order (DO) No. 30 before the end of 2016, which would amend DO 18-A. However, this did not happen, and all we saw was a working draft of the supposed DO.

NEPTALI B. SALVANERA is a partner at ACCRA Law Offices in Manila